Ignoring Things
by peacensafety
Summary: girl!Stiles, Sterek, ghosts. Derek's house is haunted, and he has to figure out how to fix it before he can continue rebuilding it. Sucks that Scott's away for the summer and the only one who can help him is Stiles.
1. Chapter 1

Stiles sat on the dock at the lake. She tried smoothing some more sunblock on her ridiculously white skin, but she knew that there was no way she was getting out of the burn that was going to torture her as soon as she settled in for the night.

"Stiles, come swimming with us!" Lydia called from the lake.

Stiles rolled her eyes before diving into the lake after her girlfriends. There was no way that just last year that Lydia freakin' Martin would have been friends. True, she was Stiles's first crush, but if Allison hadn't moved to their little town they would have never been friends. And friends is what they were, because Stiles realized that while the girl was completely gorgeous and smart and witty, there was no Naked.

Naked, as Scott defined it, was that feeling that you got when you were around someone and just had to strip their clothing off and lick them until they were moaning your name. Which was a lot more likely to happen now that Scott was a werewolf and all.

Which was another reason that Stiles was hanging out with Lydia and Allison without her best friend anywhere near her. Scott had gone and gotten himself bit so that he turned into a werewolf whenever he freaked out or if he was turned on or if there was a full moon. Stupid puppy had no sense of control whatsoever. Which is why, when Stiles had come over to try and help him pick out some clothing for a date with Allison, he had were'd out when Stiles had maybe said two or three too many words about something that she couldn't even remember anymore. And then his mom walked in.

"Scott!" she said, her eyes wide, "You're a werewolf!" Except she hadn't said werewolf. She'd said '_Shungmanitou_,' or something like that. Scott's mom sometimes said weird words, and it had taken Stiles forever to figure out that it was 'cause they were some sort of Native American or something.

"Mom, I was going to tell you…"

"You have no control," she observed with some disappointment. "You're going to stay with your cousins for the summer."

"Mo-om," Scott had said, "How is that going to teach me control?"

"Goddammit boy, look in the mirror, you're a freakin' Indian. We don't call wolves our 'brothers' and 'friends' just because we're made by _Inyan_ together. You're going to go and you're going to learn control, and when the elders decide that you're ready you can come back. I'm not going to let you hurt your friends just because you can't control yourself."

Scott's mom was kind of scary when she made her mind up like that, so Scott knew that he couldn't argue with her. This was why Stiles was spending the summer sans her best friend, who still texted her occasionally and Allison constantly.

It would have been so easy to hate Allison, for taking Stiles's best friend away from her, but the girl was so open about being best friends with Stiles despite her unfortunate diarrhea of the mouth and differently proportioned attention span problem. She accepted Stiles as quickly as she accepted Lydia, and made it easy for Stiles and Lydia to accept each other.

"I thought that Attention Deficit Disorder was just kids who didn't pay attention," Lydia confessed to her while they were treading water in the lake.

Stiles kept her attention on Lydia, trying not to think about the last time she was treading water in the school pool. "No, I can pay attention to things. Sometimes I pay attention to many things at the same time, and when I only pay attention to one thing it's like the rest of the world goes away."

Lydia frowned. "You can pay attention to a lot of things at once?"

Stiles stilled her brain for a moment so she could stay on topic, "While we're swimming, there's three squirrels playing tag on the far side of the bank, two deer in that clearing over there, your car's left tire is slightly sunken into the mud, Allison has had two flies land on her head, a fish just swam past my feet, and Derek Hale is being a creeper again behind my Jeep."

Lydia gasped when Derek stepped out from behind Stiles's Jeep, glaring at her. Stiles shrugged and flipped him off, turning her attention back to the girls that she had planned to spend the afternoon with.

"You should probably go talk to him," Allison nudged her.

Lydia giggled. "Stiles has an older man after her."

Stiles glared at both of them. They knew she was gay, and that she was sixteen and he was twenty-four, and that Derek and she practically hissed at each other any time they within a two foot proximity of each other. All of these things were not conducive for a relationship between the two of them. Even if he was Calvin Klein model gorgeous.

Stiles dragged herself up the dock to where Derek was standing. She wasn't self-conscious in her bathing suit, she told herself, as she crossed her arms over her chest and stared at Derek. It wasn't like she had anything worth hiding, anyway.

"What?" she snapped.

Derek was quiet, and he just sort of stared at her.

"You're like a freakin' stalker, Derek," Stiles said. "Pervin' on underage girls."

Derek rolled his eyes. "I can promise you, I'm not perving," Derek said. He had such a light voice for being so physically… there.

Stiles glared at him a little bit more.

"I need you to look something up for me."

"What else is new?" Stiles asked, opening her Jeep up to grab a pair of shorts to slide on over her bathing suit. She turned around to see Derek looking at her ass, and she hoped to God her heart didn't skip a beat when he looked up into her eyes, his eyes slightly bluer than normal. Stupid hazel eyes, always changing color and keeping her guessing instead of staying the same color like a normal person's. It was probably a sign of his mental instability.

Derek rolled his eyes a bit. "I need you to find out who owned my house before my family lived there."

"Derek, God, that's so easy. You could do it yourself…"

"Nope, it was part of a police investigation. Those records have been sealed."

"You just use me for my connections," Stiles grumbled.

"What else would I use you for?" Derek asked her, and they stared at each other for a moment before they looked away, blushing.

Stiles walked back to the dock. "Derek wants me to come with him!" she yelled across the lake.

"We know," Lydia laughed back at her.

Stiles flipped her off before making her way back to her Jeep and Derek. "Did you run here?" she asked him.

Derek grinned at her, shrugging. She knew he had heard Lydia's smart ass remark, but they were both ignoring it. Like they ignored a lot of things.

They drove over to Derek's house, which is where they hung out mostly since the last time Stiles's dad caught them in her room. He was understandably upset, as boys weren't allowed in her room (with Scott being the exception, because it wasn't like Scott was actually a boy), and Derek's little age gap with Stiles.

Stiles didn't mind Derek's house so much. He had been working on it in his spare time (and she often wondered where he got the money to fix the house up: it wasn't like she had found a bank account with his name on it or he had some huge inheritance from his parents) and most of the ground floor at least had dry wall up. Stiles had even fixed some of his furniture, when he had taken the rest of the pack out to run around and do werewolfy things and she had nothing else to do.

She noticed that he at least had roofing tarp up on the back end of the house now, which was good because the summer rains had made his house smell even stranger than it did what with all those stinky werewolf/wet dog/hormonal teenage boys odor that always permeated the premises. Stiles didn't say anything as she opened her laptop and made her network find Internet connection on her cell phone.

Stiles looked through the public library's records for about thirty minutes, typing in passwords that Danny had given her over the past few months when whatever Derek wanted her to look up had been password protected. She sorted through land deeds, building permits, and tax records, not even noticing when Derek somehow produced her nightly dose of Adderall with a large glass of water next to her, which she took without looking up or even acknowledging that he had been taking care of her. He found a fan which took some of the musty smell away and stirred up the too warm summer air, and just kind of puttered around her while she worked for him on her computer.

"Your house was built on the site of another burned out house, owned by a Javier Nunez, a twenty-four year old prospector in the nineteenth century," Stiles said, sipping on the water that Derek had left her. "He was married to a sixteen year old Isabella Gonzalez y Nunez, who died during childbirth shortly before the fire. Later, this land was owned by a twenty-four year old Hector Smith, who was married to… a sixteen year old Jane Bryant. She died from pneumonia, and he burnt the house down, killing himself and three other people, which was apparently deemed as a murder/suicide. Then your parents bought this apparently very cursed property for a not so amazingly low price and built a house large enough to house your entire family, until it burned down." Stiles looked up to see a very quiet Derek staring at her across the room.

"Huh," Derek said. He was always so eloquent in his observations.

Stiles looked up to finally notice that the sun had sent and the moon was rising. She had to go work at her summer job at the local diner in the morning, so she started packing things up. "I hope this means that I've answered all your questions, 'cause I got to go home," she said.

"Yeah? You gotta be somewhere?" Derek asked her.

"Yeah, it's called bed. Some of us are productive members of society and have to get sleep before going to work in the morning. It's not like they pay Sherriffs enough money that dad's gonna send me to college and then finance everything else involved with that when I'm done with school. Plus, I'm gonna need a new transmission on my Jeep, and I have to buy a dress for prom and throw in with everyone else for the limo. And I've got Senior dues and Yearbook fees…" Stiles knew she was rambling, but Derek never seemed to mind and he just leaned back against the window sill and listened to the rhythm of her voice. It was weird, whenever they were alone there was much less snarling and sarcasm recently. Stiles ignored that.

"Do you want me to ride with you home? You shouldn't be out alone," Derek said.

This made Stiles pause. Was Derek showing concern for her safety? What was that about? He had never done that before, if the constantly being thrown (sometimes physically) into danger history between them was anything to be referred to. "I can drive the fifteen minutes from my house from yours with relative safety precautions taken and not run into harm," Stiles informed him.

Derek nodded. "Call me when you get home."

Stiles looked at him strangely, but she nodded her head. "Okay," she said. "I'm going to go," she gestured to the door.

Derek nodded, and Stiles took that as her cue to leave. She walked out the door and then locked the Jeep as soon as she was inside. She had just bragged that she would be safe, so now she was paranoid that she hadn't knocked on wood. It wasn't like there wasn't a lot of wood in Derek's house to knock on, or that Derek's head wasn't made out of wood, although possibly his stomach was made out of chocolate. Bumpy, lickable chocolate. And where the hell had that thought come from? What was wrong with her? She was gay, dammit, gay! She had lusted after Lydia for years, hadn't she? She had an entire external hard drive filled with pictures of Victoria's Secret models, for crissakes. She got off on the thought of Anne Hathaway on a semi-regular basis. That made her gay, not the type to think about Derek's lickable chocolate abs.

Stiles talked with her dad for a few minutes before he went back to work to finish up some paperwork. She ran up to her room and flopped on her bed, pulling out her phone to call Derek.

"'Lo," Derek said.

"I'm home. In one piece. You happy?"

"It's normal for a man to worry about the safety of a girl driving alone at night, Stiles," Derek said.

"Yeah, whatever. You've never cared before, so I shouldn't consider it weird that you care now. Although I do. What's that about, Derek?"

Derek growled.

"Whatever again. I'm gonna go to bed now, away from your weirdness," Stiles said, and then she pressed the End button on her phone and threw it down on the bed. She dragged herself up and took a quick shower, getting the stink of the lake off of herself, and then pulled on a tank top and flannel pants before going back into her room. She didn't trust Derek enough to not be there after she had hung up on him, and she was relieved and not disappointed when he wasn't in her room when she crawled under the covers. Really. She was.

It wasn't until work the next morning that Stiles decided that she didn't really care about Derek's weirdness. She wrote it off to something he had said earlier that summer, about her being pack and he considered her his responsibility more than he should sometimes. Whatever that meant. Maybe he looked at her like an annoying little sister or something. Which would explain all the growling. All of her friends were only children, so it wasn't like she had a lot of sibling relationships to compare hers and Derek's to, so it was entirely probable that Derek saw her as a younger sister. Wasn't it?

In any case, there were eggs to serve and bacon to take back as not crispy enough, orange juice glasses to refill and coffee pots to replace. Stiles was actually pretty good at her job, something that surprised her because she always saw herself as doing something different like working in a music store or a book store or a library, but all those jobs weren't even hiring when Stiles went around applying at whatever random places took her fancy that were already held by overeducated people in a limited job market. It didn't matter: the tips were great even though the pay was quite possibly illegal, her boss didn't care when she disappeared for half an hour to go stare at the back alley behind the store for no apparent reason, and the work was mind numbing enough that she could basically tell what people were going to order on the limited menu before they opened their mouths. It was good, in the way that things like going to the bathroom or going to English or gym or getting picked on at school was good in its predictability. These were the things that made up Stiles's life.

Stiles smelled like grease and coffee grinds by the time her shift was done. Her arm had gotten a little burnt from having grease spilled across her wrist on a slight collision with the cook after rushing into the kitchen during the morning hour rush. She kept trying to suck on it, because the ice had just made it feel like complete shit. She was concentrating on the burn so hard she hadn't seen Derek being a lurking lurker who lurks all up against her driver's side door.

"What happened?" Derek asked, looking concerned.

"Jesus fuck shit, Derek," Stiles said, being startled as she pulled off her greasy apron that had been hanging over her jeans and tee-shirt. "Get a job. Go do something else other than taking every opportunity to encourage pants shitting amongst the easily startled."

Derek gave her a look that was incredibly hard to interpret, but Stiles was used to those looks so it was easy to ignore. What wasn't ignorable (was that a word) was the way that Derek grabbed her wrist, stared at the burn on it for a total of two seconds before he pulled it up to his mouth and just fucking licked it, like that was socially acceptable and something that people actually did in public. And what startled Stiles more than the licking was the fact that she was not jerking her wrist away, and instead stared in fascination as Derek's tongue just caressed her wrist over and over again, soothing the burn in a way that her mouth hadn't.

Derek was licking her wrist and her burn and her spit. "I slobbered all over that already," Stiles said weakly.

Derek smirked at her before he let go.

"What are you doing here?" Stiles asked, and for once she was tired of being confrontational. "Don't you have a pack to train or something?"

Derek shrugged. "I guess. It's just, Scott's not here, so I wanted someone who was a little more… adult than they are to hang out with. And you're not working, so let's go do something."

"Like what?" Stiles asked, wishing that he had come around when she didn't smell like a greasy diner. And why should she care about that? "And I'm the same age as your pack, aren't I? Can't you bite someone older?"

"They never adapt as well," Derek shrugged. "Teenagers are most likely to survive the bite."

Stiles nodded her head as if this were the most logical statement in the world. "Fine. Let me go home and get this stink off me, and then we'll… whatever. Hang out."

Derek climbed into her Jeep, and Stiles sighed. Because logic had obviously flown out the window at this point.

She only glanced over at Derek once during the drive home, and then chanted Anne Hathaway's name in her mind like a mantra for the rest of the drive. She was gay, after all.

**So, I've got some pretty desperate writer's block at the moment. I don't know if this is going anywhere, and I don't know if I even like this, (I'm not going to reread it before putting it out there or anything, so this is completely not edited or anything and sorry about the typos or inconsistencies) so don't get too upset if this just ends here. I'll try to update it but I'm trying even more not to push myself, and I thought writing another fandom would help me out. We'll see how it goes. **


	2. Chapter 2

So leprechauns were real. Who knew? And who really expected them to show up in the middle of the college freshman English class that Lydia, Danny, and Stiles were taking as part of their AP program that summer? There were a few fires that Lydia took care of while Danny and Stiles used Danny's tee-shirt to capture the wily bastard while the rest of the class and the overworked English professor did not helpful things like ran around screaming at the sight of the leprecaun's tiny little dagger teeth that he flashed for presumably panic inducing reasons. And tiny little dagger teeth? Not really registering on any of the kids from Beacon Hill's scary radar.

Which was the explanation that Stiles gave the teacher after the capture of said leprechaun that Danny was holding on their way to dispose of it at Derek's house. "How did you know how to handle that?" the teacher asked.

"We're from Beacon Hills High," Stiles said.

"Oh," the teacher said, and apparently news of the weird shit from that area of the state had traveled because the teacher excused them without needing anything else said.

Lydia and Danny argued with Stiles for a few minutes about what they were going to do with the now captured leprechaun, but Stiles won in insisting that they take the wee little beastie to Derek's house.

Danny manhandled the little bundle of joy into Derek's house, and they all tried not to laugh as the leprechaun kept cussing them in a voice that sounded like it had sucked on helium too long. Derek looked surprised to see those three walking up the steps to his house, and he met them at the door. "What happened?" he demanded, looking slightly panicked.

"Not a big deal, sourwolf," Stiles said, "Just a leprechaun…"

Derek looked at the ball in Danny's arms, taking it away and unwrapping it so that only the leprechaun's really ugly face looked up at him, snarling.

Derek's eyes glowed red as he stared at it, and the leprechaun's demeanor immediately changed. "Lemme go, lemme go!" it shrieked, "I hates wolves!"

"I wish…" Derek started saying.

"No, I wanna stay with her!" the leprechaun's tiny little arm pointed out at Stiles. "She smells so very nice!"

"Oh man," Stiles moaned, "I have leprechaun pheromones…"

"She smells like trees and waterfalls and yellow flowers and I wanna stay with her! I don't like wolves!"

Danny laughed. "Aw, it's got a crush on you, Stiles!"

"Shut up, Danny," Stiles said.

"I wish you gone from this state forever," Derek said, glaring at the tiny creature.

"Dammit," the leprechaun said, and then he popped out of existence.

Danny was still laughing. "The leprechaun… had a crush… on Stiles…"

"Shut up, Danny," Stiles repeated herself.

"So you can really make leprechauns grant wishes?" Lydia asked Derek, looking speculative.

"Yes, and they almost always go wrong," Derek said. "I hope I didn't leave a loophole in that wish."

"Only if he decides to interpret 'this state' as a state of matter," Stiles said, thinking out loud. "He could always come back in a gaseous state, or in a different body. Or if for some reason California declares itself independent from the United States, and then becomes a republic…"

Derek glared at Stiles, who just smiled and shrugged.

"Where were the three of you together that it attacked you?" Derek asked.

"Um…" See, Stiles didn't really want anyone to know where she was. She didn't like it when people knew that she and Lydia and Danny had spent the last two summers taking prep courses for college, and that the summer before they graduated they were taking college courses. "We were just hanging out."

Danny and Lydia looked at Stiles, and then Lydia pulled out a nail file and started working on her nails and Danny started finding the porch roof fascinating.

Derek narrowed his eyes at Stiles. She was really going to have to work on lying more often, because she really sucked at it.

The long and entirely predictable awkward silence following Stiles's lie was brought to Stiles thanks in large to Danny, who thought that bringing up something the leprechaun said was better than Derek waiting for Stiles to fess up. "So why does Stiles's scent matter?"

Derek looked surprised. "Stiles smells good," as if that was an explanation.

"Like, the rest of us stink?" Lydia asked, cutting off Stiles's question.

"No, she just smells good," Derek shrugged. "Are we done here?"

"Yeah," Stiles said, not really wanting to discuss her odor. "Let's go," she jerked her head back towards her Jeep. It had been her week to drive, and she needed to drop Danny and Lydia back off at their houses.

Stiles drove her friends in silence, not really wanting to talk about anything at all with them. They weren't the ones who understood the way her brain worked, and if she said anything to them at all they'd just shrug it off to her being weird. She drove past Allison's house, but Allison wasn't home. That left just one person that she could talk to.

She stopped at a convenience store to pick up some tea and cookies, because this was kind of a tradition that she had since she was twelve and had gotten her first period. Her dad had panicked, not wanting to talk about it with Stiles at all, so he had bought her tea and cookies and dropped her off for an afternoon with Mrs. McCall. Ever since then, her dad had been more than willing to drop her off whenever she had a weird question, and when Stiles had gotten her license and her Jeep she continued to stop by just to chat. She liked Mrs. McCall.

She drove to the hospital, relieved to see Mrs. McCall at the reception desk in the Long Term Resident Ward. Stiles parked her Jeep, locked it up, and then walked into the hospital with her little paper bag of refreshments.

Scott's mom smiled at her, and one of the other nurses made an excuse of doing rounds while shoving her wheelie office chair at Stiles and getting up to walk around.

"What's going on, Stiles?" Mrs. McCall asked.

"I think I'm in love with an older man," Stiles announced without preamble.

"Derek?" Mrs. McCall asked her, sipping on the cold tea.

Stiles grimaced. "That obvious, huh?"

"If I was twenty years younger, I'd fight you for him," Mrs. McCall snickered.

Stiles laughed. Mrs. McCall was awesome for not making her feel like a freak for even considering someone that much older than she was. "What's wrong with me?" she asked anyway.

"Absolutely nothing," Mrs. McCall reassured her. "Do you think he likes you back?"

"He said I smelled nice," Stiles said.

"Hm." Mrs. McCall seemed to be thinking for a minute. "I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know about this situation. You know teenage pregnancy is not sexy, and you know that an older man should never touch you, so I'm not going to waste my time on pointing that out. I am, however, going to give you an adult's point of view on it, if you want."

Stiles nodded. Sure, she was smart, but she was also smart enough to know that sometimes an outside perspective was what was needed.

"Adults don't make rules about relationships between children and adults for no reason. Derek is a gorgeous man, and he's attractive enough that he gets attention wherever he goes. He's also humble enough that it makes him even more attractive. Added to the fact that for whatever reason, he seems to be pretty protective of you and Scott and your friends, this is going to turn any girl's head. Am I getting this right?"

Stiles nodded. This covered a lot of bases, especially with Mrs. McCall's limited understanding of the situation.

"Teenagers, it doesn't matter if they're girls or boys, are realizing that their parents aren't the only people in the world. They have a deep seated desire to impress people outside of their family, be that their friends or other adults. They're looking for affirmation from someone else that they're good enough, worthy, and they're seeking approval. Most teenagers get this solely from their peer group, but sometimes their peer group includes people who are older. Those people's opinions have more weight than even their parents' opinions. So when an older person shows interest in a younger person, the younger person usually strives to become whatever the older person wants. They end up changing themselves in order to please that person. This isn't always a bad thing: especially if that older person wants what's best for the younger person. Many times when a romantic relationship is entered though, all of those feelings become even more intense; and romance can become a very selfish thing when it's all one sided. Then it takes years for the younger person to find themselves, to assert themselves against the older person's opinions and ideas. That's a very scary thing for adults to watch, so we set up rules about sex and age and what's considered appropriate."

Stiles sat back, nibbling on her cookies. "Do you think it's possible, a relationship between a sixteen year old and someone eight years older than her?"

"Anything is possible, but I wish you would think about what I've said before you make any decisions. Not only that, but until this point, I really didn't think that we had to worry about you and boys?"

Stiles blushed. "I didn't either, but… there's just something about him."

"While the easy explanation would be how he fills out his clothing, I hope that you see more to him than that."

"He's… sweet. And intense. And at the oddest times, he's just a little bit vulnerable. He hides his books when we come into a room. And he loves to watch baseball: he'll get this little crease in his forehead when he's watching a play, and he tenses up like he's going to run the bases or catch the ball even though the game is on TV. And he's growing a rose bush in the back yard. Sometimes it scratches him, but he never says anything about it…"

Mrs. McCall sipped her tea some more, and Stiles took that as an invitation to keep talking.

"He only tells me to shut up when he has to say something, but when we're just hanging out he never tells me that. He just listens, and no one ever just lets me talk like that except you. He watches me when I'm talking like I'm the most fascinating thing on the planet even when I'm not sure if he's hearing my words. He makes sure I always have the pink Starburst when we go to the movies. Scott doesn't even know that I like the pink Starburst…"

Mrs. McCall snickered at that, too.

"He gives me bumpy skin, just by coming into the same room as me… and I like his smell, too…"

Mrs. McCall tilted her head, looking at Stiles. "Is Derek… you probably shouldn't tell me, but is he… like Scott?"

Stiles kept a straight face. "I don't know if I should say who is or who is not like Scott. I might be breaking a sacred oath or something."

Mrs. McCall nodded her head. "All right then, that's fair. It's just… if he is, there are other things that you need to know. And if he is, you're going to have to ask him about them. If he doesn't tell you, then that means you aren't important to him."

Stiles blinked. There was a lot of stuff that Derek didn't tell her about. "Oh."

"There are rules about this, Stiles. And if you were to be with someone like Scott, he or she would have to tell you those rules: to keep you safe from themselves and others, and to keep themselves safe."

Stiles nodded her head. "I see."

Her visit with Mrs. McCall was cut short when a patient pressed the nurse's button and she had to go check on them. Stiles waited until Mrs. McCall was gone, and then she packed up her things and went out to her Jeep. There were so many things that she had to think about, a feat which was usually easy with her ADHD, something her mother said was like a superpower.

Being diagnosed with ADHD was kind of frightening. The label made her aware that she was not like everyone else, that she was going to have to learn how to function in a non-ADHD world and learn organizational skills that most other people would never have to develop. Fortunately, the psychiatrist at her dad's work had experience with abnormal psychology, and they caught her diagnosis pretty early so she had time to adjust and a psychologist to work with her.

ADHD was basically a malformed gland in the head. It meant that normally, Stiles was not as aware of the outside world as other people her own age, and there was a large disconnect between events happening inside her head and events happening in the outside world. Stiles had taken a one hundred question test when her dad had insisted on her being tested, and she had made it to question sixty-six before she got bored and started doodling in the margins.

The psychiatrist who administered the test said that in itself was a sign.

Then came the big test: the psychiatrist told her that since her parents suspected that she had ADHD, there was one way to test it that had never failed him. He placed two cans of Diet Coke in front of her and started a stopwatch. She was told to drink the soda in an hour, and the way she reacted would tell him everything he needed to know.

Lots of people claimed to have ADHD, but for the most part those kids were just the product of bad parenting. If a child of bad parenting drank two cans of soda and did not have ADHD, they would be bouncing off the walls. The psychiatrist said that he usually just told the parents they were right but that he didn't have time to treat the problems that those children had. He wouldn't prescribe anything for those kids and he would send them to a different psychiatrist, one who had no qualms in taking money from bad parents who wanted an excuse to whine to their friends about how bad their child was.

Stiles however, did not have a psychiatrist who felt the need to take people's money and pat them on the back. Her psychiatrist watched as she drank the soda and then promptly passed out.

Kids with ADHD had reverse metabolism. They could eat all the candy they wanted, and the sugar would simply make them sleepy. Stiles's psychiatrist started working with her and her parents as soon as she had woken up.

She hated the Adderall, but it was so much better than Ritalin that it sometimes made her cry. Ritalin had made her feel like her head was in a fishbowl, like her entire life was a television show. Adderall kept her quieter than she naturally would have been (something that should honestly scare the crap out of her friends, if she ever told them), and she could concentrate for hours at a time. It made her incredibly tired, but she had learned how to work with it.

Her organizational skills were bar none more advanced than any other kid her age. She lived by her lists, her tables, her graphic organizers, and her schedules. Her backpack was a study in pouches, boxes, a big huge binder, and Ziploc bags.

Taking all of that into consideration, Stiles needed to figure out Derek. It might take a few organizers (she could see in her head the sketches of a Spider Web organizer) and maybe some notes, like a pro/con list, and she would have to get some new dividers for her binder so she could organize everything.

She wasn't OCD. She didn't feel a compulsion to organize everything, didn't feel incomplete when she didn't. She had to force herself to do this, had to drag her ass out of bed early every morning to make sure she went through her lists, ticked things off that needed to be ticked off, and edited and amended them and rewrote them so that they would be neat. It was exhausting to live this way, but it worked for her, and her grades showed it.

Stiles pulled her attention, something that felt like a physical effort, away from her ADHD and all of the factors that were involved in it. This decision would be no less important to her than the decision to not be a victim of her brain abnormality. She had a feeling that if she wanted to be with Derek, it wouldn't be a temporary fling.

Stiles forced her brain to slow down and be reasonable once she got to her room. She found a comfortable position in the cool blue sheets on her bed, and before writing anything down she simply centered herself and started focusing. She was grateful that she hadn't left anything incriminating on her laptop screen when Derek crawled through her window.

"Where were you at tonight?" he repeated the question from earlier. He came into her room and sat on the chair at her computer desk, glaring at her.

"Why do you care?" Stiles asked. She wanted to know that it wasn't just her. She wanted to know that he actually cared a little bit, before she considered this course of action any further.

"What happens if you get into trouble? What am I supposed to do if I don't know where the three of you are? You don't even smell like Beacon Hills…"

"We have summer school," Stiles gave. She waited for him to take and reciprocate.

"The three of you? Really?"

"Yes."

"Why do I have problems believing that?" Derek asked.

"It's a college class, Derek. We're getting our freshman English class out of the way," Stiles said.

Derek's eyes got bigger, and he stood up and moved away from her. "Oh. Well, that's good. That will make it easier for you when you go away. To college. It will look good on your transcripts…"

"We took freshman history already. We're going to take Calculus and Biology this year. By the time we graduate high school, we'll be done with our freshman year of college," Stiles said.

"That's good. That's really good. I didn't even know you could do that in high school," Derek ran a hand through his hair. "Where are you thinking about going?"

"We're thinking Berkley. Danny and I are, anyway. Lydia's big old math brain is probably going to UCLA."

"She should go to MIT. You should go to MIT…"

"I've already been recruited to West Point," Stiles said, looking at Derek. "I've already been offered a position at MIT. I still think that I'm going to go to Berkley. We're all going to get through college as quickly as possible so that we can come back here…"

"Why?" Derek looked at her, and then it looked like he changed his mind. "You should go to those schools, Stiles. The world could use your brain. You shouldn't hide your talents…"

"I'm only going to be gone for three years. Two, if I can get my advisor to sign the papers to let me double up on courses…"

"Don't do that," Derek said. "There's no reason for you to do that. You should enjoy your college years…"

"What are you going to do without me?" Stiles challenged him. "You guys are crap without me, you can't plan for shit, you can't…"

"You think I can't control my pack without you?" Derek asked, his eyes flashing red. "Why would I need a sixteen year old human girl? I'm an Alpha werewolf, Stiles, with generations of werewolves in my family. You think I couldn't handle some cubs without you? I think you have mistaken your worth to my pack. You need to go to one of those schools, the ones that are reputable and you need to use your brain for the rest of the world. You think one little insignificant pack in Beacon Hills needs you to hold yourself back for that? That would make you an idiot, wouldn't it?"

Stiles stared, quietly as Derek shredded her heart into small pieces. She didn't know she was crying at all until Derek cursed and left her bedroom, slamming her window shut behind him.

Stiles looked down at the blank piece of paper laying in front of her, her vision blurring. Apparently, making a list would not help in this situation.


End file.
